Russia’s Land Battleship

During WWII, Soviet leader Stalin was so encouraged by a story of how one single Soviet KV-2 tank was able to hold off an entire company of German tanks. This encouraged Stalin to ask his military engineers to build a form of supertank or a sort of land battleship. One design was this KV-VI which was a monstrous size with more than enough firepower to hold 0ff land forces and troops. However, the huge design likely presented a big target for enemy aircraft. But, it was an interesting example of a wild WWII secret weapon.

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This is a hoax. The model above was made up of other old russian tank model parts and then a fake history was put on the internet.

Paul Hooson

None were built I know. I know that there were some pretty bizarre secret weapon prototypes by many countries that never witnessed actual production, Germany had plenty of prototypes that were never made into regular production.

Brett Buck

It was dreamed up entirely by a plastic model guy with a bunch of spare Russian tank parts. It wasn’t a real design, a prototype, anything, it appeared as a plastic model in the 2000s and someone put up a phony website about it!

Paul Hooson

The overly long tank treads do look very suspect. Wouldn’t have the mobility of a normal tank. Then again look at those crazy half motorcycle half tank vehicles the Germans built. They didn’t have the normal ability of a tank or motorcycle.- An interesting hoax this land battleship.

Frankly, I don’t see any way that thing could have turned other than very, very gently. You might as well have put it on rails, because any attempt to use the normal method of braking one track and allowing the other to slew the vehicle around would have created tremendous forces on the stopped tread, snapping links like crazy.

But as you posted further down, the Soviets did an amazing job in WW2, hamstrung as they were. Damn shame Stalin and Beria had the legacy they did.

Second turret from the front – no way to turn it to the other side, unless those barrels angle up a whole lot further than it looks like they do…

Yeah, someone was having fun there.

Paul Hooson

Russia had few good weapons during WWII, so this design was suspect here. Some of the best Russian weapons were simple things like the Molitov cocktail or putting bombs on dogs to use as antitank weapons. The WWII Red Army was indeed in sad condition for equipment as well as good leadership because Stalin had killed off so many military leaders that he considered possible threats to his absolute power. He essentially forced his people at any cost to them to throw their lives at the German Army so that he could retain power. But, the Russian people were willing to fight a good fight for nationalism, which is also something that the Germans underestimated.